Dodges the cliches of "pure pursuit of knowledge can't be wrong or bad" and "any type of restraint on liberty is evil" and "the smart people as the moral good guys being oppressed by the stupider bureaucrats," but it does so in a way that isn't surprising or refreshing because of how obvious the story makes its twist. As soon as you learn that Potterley had a daughter who died young, and who Mrs. Potterley is still obsessed with you know the technology in question isn't going to be a purely beneficial one- it's clearly going to exacerbate the character's problems, and not solve them. Once you make that connection within the first couple pages you can see everything coming until perhaps the last couple pages, where Asimov lets the main characters succeed despite their better judgment.

If the ideas I mentioned in the first sentence of this review were new to me then this story might receive a better rating, since those ideas are well worth considering, but I had come across them before. If you've never read a science fiction story portraying scientists as anything but the paradigms of human virtue and science as anything but the highest human achievement then you should read this story. Otherwise it is solid, but not one of Asimov's best (The Last Question, Nightfall) ( )